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Madison the Makeup Guru is 5 years Old

I thought this segment on The Morning Show was going to be mostly about adultification of children - five year old Madison has over a million views on YouTube for her many videos of her applying makeup and reviewing it - in a five year old kind of way: "I really love it". But in the end I thought it was about something innocent that ended up with a child becoming a PR vehicle for adult makeup products - what do you think?

Melinda Tankard Reist and I talked about this set of videos. When I delved more into the videos they include Madison modeling her outfit of the day. The outfits are modest and fairly typical for a little girl. But at the end of most of those videos she turns around and wiggles her backside at the camera - not provocatively - but like a little girl.

Each part of this situation on its own is probably not harmful but the combination of multiple videos, the intense public attention, the bottom wiggling and to me the most concerning - adult makeup products being sent to Madison and reviewed by her with links back to those sites - looks to me like something relatively innocent going a little too far.

Some readers will find the whole thing harmless, and for each of us, it's a personal decision we make about how much and what we allow our children to do online. In the end it's all about context isn't it? An amusing video of a child doing something funny is probably fine but is it fine for a parent to allow a little girl to be a PR vehicle for a product designed for adults? There will be differing views on this and I would love to read them. If you have time, look at a few of the videos on YouTube to understand the full story.

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Michelle's family consists of 4 kids, 1 dog and a husband (although he was the only family member not to make it into her blog title). In a past life she was a union organiser, worked in a domestic violence agency and studied Arts/Law. For relaxation she reads, preferably while comfortably seated at a cafe.

Michelle is Australian but also a citizen of the United States where she has lived previously. She has recently returned with her family to California this year after spending the past six years in her home town of Sydney. While finding change exciting, Michelle says packing up her life and starting again was just a little daunting. We're sure it will provide fertile ground for new writing material.

Michelle likes to say that her family comes with a dash of Aspergers, along with generous servings of humour, intelligence and creativity. While this quirk may bring certain challenges, it makes life just that little bit more interesting. Her home is television-free but somehow her children seem to manage to wrangle indecent amounts of screen time at every opportunity.